In the Beaulieu Valley
ON the edge of the ash-wood, where the track of the timber- carts emerged on to open grassland, a gamekeeper had chosen to set up his vermin-larder : nine weasels, two stoats, and two sparrow-hawks, all dangling from a low horizontal bough in the watery sunlight : wretched little soaked half- skeletons, a-swing from their woodland gibbets as highway robbers used to swing on hill-top crossways, an awful example to their fellow-criminals. They had a pathetic look ; and certainly those sparrow-hawks should not have been there. When will gamekeepers realize that hawks, buzzards, owls are his friends, not his enemies ? It would be interesting to know why even weasels and rats, which must be killed, should he left to stink among the trees. Can it be that gamekeepers think they act as deterrents ? Imagine a stoat slithering through the grass on his way to rob a pheasant's nest, sud- denly confronted with these gruesome relics of his dead cousins. Does the gamekeeper see him turning away with a shudder and slinking home to ponder over good and evil ? Last autumn I walked through a delicate birchwood in Dorset which was literally a sylvan morgue ; every branch near the ground had its line of culprits, even little owls, kestrels, and stray cats being represented. It would surely be to the point if owners of estates, who are fond of setting up minatory notice-boards warning trespassers against defacing the landscape, would first instruct their gamekeepers in the craft of grave-digging. It is most unpleasant walking through a wood of hanged bodies, especially in the twilight.
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